For a minute ago, there was a huge opening for my book “When Fear Comes Home to Love” – it is being presented in the #me too-community on Facebook. That is a closed group, but here is a link to a series of 10 FREE video/audio webinars that may save your sanity and life, if you count yourselves as one of the me-too’s

I have worked as a therapist and healer since 1988, and as soon as I started my practice I realized that all my clients showed very similar patterns – and they all mirrored patterns in me.I give Expressive Arts Therapy, and as soon as the patient sat down to draw or paint, or any other expression, the air was filled with Presence. All the images led to LOVE showing up – in details,word, and most of all, numinous synchronicities in our lives. Early into this process, out of the blue, a publisher phoned me and asked me “Shouldn’t you write a book?” And i should and did.

As soon as I had made my commitment, inner guidance turned up – in one of my agonized nights filled with dark and demonic visitations, I asked intensely for help and there S/he was – I called It BLUE.She explained the “mechanics” of the violator/victim-spectrum, and told me I was here to explore this with my patients – to find certain archetypes we all share, how to recognize them and how to relate to them to transform them.

What made it possible to write that book, was the constant weird and wonderful synchronicities that turned up. I have included them in the book – it sprinkles a highly needed flavor of humor and giggles into the work, helping us to dis-identify from the archetypes – be their loving observer ♥

That took about 25 years.
I self published it – the publisher told me that his editors were not skilled to edit it – so I had to edit it with BLUE instead 🙂

Blue linked me to Jennifer last June, and I took the STT training – so when she advertised the free #MeTooHealingIntensive webinars I got big shivers. I realized this was a huge gift to me – but also a gift to the book – here was the true energetic opening for it.

I am beyond relieved and grateful for everything that brought me to this life and to link up with Jennifer and #MeTooHealingIntensive. I love you all!

Here is the link – you can read about it, read reviews and peak inside. It comes in Kindle too – much cheaper

I am doing a 30-days forgiveness practice from Way of Mastery, and last night I saw a black iron pole through the chest. Just as if I had been inside a Dracula’s body:) The release was s w e e t

Then next level of it came up – and it turned out that I was forgiving stuff in the root chakra. And then Blue reminded me of the image I painted 1998:(see photo of the tree below.)

The Bird in the crown-part is the archetype of the “savior” who needs” to “save” others to achieve value. I have found Bird in all my patients, and much of my forgiveness-work now are finding part of her in my bodymind and forgiving all my judgements of her – oh my! – and instead honoring her for her intense wish to be of service.

This image later became the cover of my book – which is about the exploration of the figures/archetypes in the Tree.

This morning I was nudged to look through the photos of the Image again – and since this healing of the root came up for me now, in our chapter 6-exploration,I want to share the very process of receiving the Image and the energy, that lead up to my work. It feels like this is the time for a new LIGHT into it – and into the root chakra we all share.

Here it is:

“During my education in Expressive Arts Therapy in Switzerland, our class gathered in Gwatt by Thunersee a couple of weeks in May to explore our birth families through painting, sculpting and storytelling, under the magic leadership of Mariagnese Cattaneo. Each of us was to visualize our family as a tree, and then paint the tree (see the Image / the cover). Afterward we made a story from the painting and shared it with a partner. The day after, we expanded the work further – making rapid sculptures of our family members from all kind of materials. I choose clay and painted tissue-paper.

As I closed my eyes during the visualization of my family tree, a tremendous energy soared through me. A door to a blocked and hidden room inside me opened – now the freed energy rushed forth to greet me. “Pay attention! This is important!” was the clear message within the experience. A melting sense of gratitude and release opened my heart and soul – something within whispered “at last” and relaxed deeply.

The image of The Tree presented itself with great force and detail. I painted as if in a trance, with lightning speed, serving the Image as well as I could – not censoring any of the strange mythical figures. The Image commanded faithfulness from me, and my feeling of curiosity and wonder grew as I allowed it to come through me.

After having written down the story coming from The Image, and having shared it with my classmate Aaron, The Image and Story would not let me rest. I decided to create a healing ritual from The Story. I did this with Aaron as co-player and witness. The insights were startling.

I sensed I was being shown something that must not be interfered with intellectually, not analyzed or controlled in any way. Once again, Aaron and I took my sculpted family out into the friendly Swiss wood, just outside our painting studio, to unravel them and explore their mystery and gifts of healing. The ritual exploration was done within a circular sacred space we created, and showed us with uncanny clarity the split within my family’s psyche. One the one side, there was blind need and terror, caused by trance-like sexual abuse. It was accompanied by the denial of the acts and all the pain they caused, which created the adapting, conforming survivors. The family had successfully dissociated from this. And then we all had dissociated from our Self and the light within – our true I Am. This was the beginning of the process that connected me to my forgotten personal story or myth – which later turned out to be a blueprint of the collective Myth, described in “The Jekyll and Hyde-family.”***

Yet another digital thingy has helped me lately – my readers will remember the out-door lamp and the door bell – is the timer on my cell phone! I have used it to time a five minutes x 3-meditation in lesson 3 in The Way of Mastery – and it has done weird things: I sit and wait for the timer to ring – and it does not – and I sit and wait and wait – and it does not ring …

So I open it to look how many minutes I have left, since it feels I have sat there for 10 minutes at least – and the second I grip the phone to open it, it rings.

The two first times this was fun – but now, after this repeating for the last 4 weeks, today I got the idea to watch the TV-clock in front of me. Sure enough, it showed 10 minutes as I sat there waiting for the timer to sound the five-minute-signal.

I was aware that what I started out with today, was the tremendous feeling of pressure and force, OCD-like – I HAVE TO “get” this – control this – understand this. And I sat as Christ with it, allowing it to be there,truly wanting to be guided to realize what the gift was.

These obsessive-compulsive feelings have laid my creative life barren for the last two months: I have been stuck in believing I have to produce a creative “result” – a painting, a sculpture, a poem – instead of enjoying myself playing and watching where it wants to go. Everything has shut down, coalesced into a hard ball of compulsion, no joy whatever, life becoming dull and pale as a tepid puddle

Now -the cellphone behavior has stayed that way until I at last today KNOW what that time-weirdness was FOR: Yet another digital way my Universe shows me that I AM SAFE. I am taken care of – I can trust this, and therefore trust the process, completely.

The moment I realized, I left the Christ meditation and found that part of me who had needed to hold on to this compulsive self-coercion as a way to survive. I asked where it could be found in my body: left lung. I went there and saw this terrified one who needed to control herself completely after severe trauma in order to stay safe inside her family. The moment I discovered her and told her that I saw her and was there for her, the energetic connection was made. The dams of grief broke. She saw she was not alone any longer. I acknowledged to her that it had been a vital choice to make when she was little – it would have been dangerous to be open about this in the family – she would not have been heard at all. As long as nobody would see and hear and listen to her, this was a wise choice to take. Holding on to this, creating this pattern, has kept us alive and functioning – and now is the glorious moment to let it out and express, with me as her loving companion.

So she did the best thing she could at that time: making a decision to control ,repress, push away whatever reminded her of the agony. NOW – with me – she was no longer alone, the spell could be dissolved.

And so we dissolved it – I encouraged her to feel the fear and anger and express in any way she wanted and needed, while I was witnessing it all from a neutral and all-loving observer-state – like a fairy godmother maybe. You know these godmothers – they love us and support us, but will never interfere with our feelings, they trust us completely to have the strength and wisdom necessary to go through life – into the desert and out again. Some even does that in 40 days. I have used a bit longer.

There came a moment where she discovered that the LOVE that embraced her was stronger than the original trauma, and the beliefs unwound beautifully.

I asked her then, what did she need now – after all of this?

Pause. “That you don’t get mad if I fall back into the control-pattern.”

Realizing, that only if I believed that to be serious, I would be in trouble – just being aware that “oh, there I go again, no biggie” would be just fine.

Watching how the ego wants guilt and punishment to strengthen its hold on us

Now I checked out the cellphone timer again in 5 minutes – meditation. Twice. The timer behaving like other timers – signaling after five minutes. What does this mean?

OH! here comes rushes of spiritual energy! It means I am looked after! This is the third time God has shown me She uses whatever means to show me that I am NOT a separated traumatized human being.

The first was my outdoor lamp that lightens automatically when it is dark. Whenever it did not, for 3 years, I could stand there and look at it and find whatever darkness in me at that moment that I believed was true – and acknowledge it and forgive myself – and the light went on.

The second was the electronic door-bell, who the last year has co-cooed in a different way than when one pushes the button – it co-coo’es when nobody is there. Except I now know that my Self is there, each time letting me know to put everything I do away, sit down and pay attention to the energies that wants to come through and be released

The third – all good things go by threes – is today, my cellphone-timer. It took me just one month to see it this time.

All of this – through the last 5 years – to help me see that I am taken care of

It pretty well takes care of the separation-conviction!

It shows me: in each and every situation where “things happen,” I have the choice to how I want to relate to it. As a victim – oh this is too serious, I am being punished, I must have done something to deserve this, I haven’t done “enough “ (therapy, work on myself, exercise blah) – or as creator:

This has come up for me to see and love. I acknowledge that something happened sometime – in this or other lives / in other dimensions of the multidimensional hologram of the universe, that caused me to make beliefs and draw conclusions from what happened – and what they all have in common is the root-belief of the human: I am on my own here. Every man for himself. Love and acknowledgments must be earned from others/ the outside.

As soon as I turned toward that compulsive obsessive controller inside with curiosity and love, she led me straight back to Source – and then the Outer ( this time the cell-phone) mirrored my new – and true – perception. As soon as I saw the real meaning of the cellphone-behavior, it turned back to normal.

*

Back to the little one in the left lung:

I asked her to imagine out how it would feel to truly KNOW that the pattern was gone, that is was absolutely safe – just pretending , just playing –

She told me it would feel so safe

And how does it feel to feel so safe?

Like life is safe for me – life is simple – life loves me! LIFE LOVES ME!

I sat as the observer and allowed the energy of this belief to flow through me – LIFE LOVES ME

And we had a little ceremony where she said three times with me I AM LOVED BY LIFE, claiming it and owning it

The deep chest pain and cough was particularly nasty this morning. I prayed deeply and sincerely for help to see this differently. I got up, and found myself looking at a book in the shelf above my head. I got the message, pulled it out. It was a journal, 29 years old, from my first training in Sweden in Expressive Arts Therapy.

I had no idea I had done that. And that I had not seen it before! I opened the first page, and read about an exercise we did the second day: “Who am I now?” Paint it.

This “I” had the day before been initiated into a shamanic journey through 4 years, and the opening into all this “new” exercises ( but not new to my Soul 🙂 felt like an earthquake. Maybe cataclysm is a better word.

In that image, there were two parts – a childlike playful colorful one, and a chaotic threatening one.

And then, there was an opening. Kind of a “hole.” That hole was the only thing I liked – 29 years ago. We were told to enlarge the one detail we loved the most, and I happily painted it again. I needed to have it clean. It was filled with BLUE. I wrote under the sketch in the journal:

I need my hole. It sits in the chest region. It has to do with the throat chakra

THIS is what I am shown: what I have seen as something I hate and want to get rid of – for about 30 years – is something I have told myself I needed when I grew up.

It is not something bad to get rid of – it is a huge gift, to be unwrapped delicately!

The moment I withdraw all my judgments of the wound – and the ways I have “protected it” and built shells around it – tears flowed like Niagara.

I sit with it, and the familiar almost-fainting state appears. For the first time I truly realize that it is not something “wrong” with me, health wise – it is a unraveling of old tight holdings around my heart. It was something I needed then– in order to feel safe.

I do not know more for the time being – other than that this is such a wonderful process – and i let myself off the hook for not having discovered it until now: things had to happen first, to prepare the way.

For new readers: BLUE is my guide in my book “When Fear Comes Home to Love.” Here is an excerpt from the Introduction, describing the process of painting the Tree on the Cover – the Image that gave rise to the book and the exploration of archetypes.

During my education in Expressive Arts Therapy in Switzerland, our class gathered in Gwatt by Thunersee a couple of weeks in May to explore our birth families through painting, sculpting and storytelling, under the magic leadership of Mariagnese Cattaneo. Each of us was to visualize our family as a tree, and then paint the tree (see the Image / the cover). Afterward we made a story from the painting and shared it with a partner. The day after, we expanded the work further – making rapid sculptures of our family members from all kind of materials. I choose clay and painted tissue-paper.

As I closed my eyes during the visualization of my family tree, a tremendous energy soared through me. A door to a blocked and hidden room inside me opened – now the freed energy rushed forth to greet me. “Pay attention! This is important!” was the clear message within the experience. A melting sense of gratitude and release opened my heart and soul – something within whispered “at last” and relaxed deeply.

The image of The Tree presented itself with great force and detail. I painted as if in a trance, with lightning speed, serving the Image as well as I could – not censoring any of the strange mythical figures. The Image commanded faithfulness from me, and my feeling of curiosity and wonder grew as I allowed it to come through me.

After having written the story coming from The Image, and having shared it with my classmate Aaron, The Image and Story would not let me rest. I decided to create a healing ritual from The Story. I did this with Aaron as co-player and witness. The insights were startling.

I sensed I was being shown something that must not be interfered with intellectually, not analyzed or controlled in any way. Once again, Aaron and I took my sculpted family out into the friendly Swiss wood, just outside our painting studio, to unravel them and explore their mystery and gifts of healing. The ritual exploration was done within a circular sacred space we created, and showed us with uncanny clarity the split within my family’s psyche. One the one side, there was blind need and terror, caused by trance-like sexual abuse. It was accompanied by the denial of the acts and all the pain they caused, which created the adapting, conforming survivors. The family had successfully dissociated from this. And then we all had dissociated from our Self and the light within – our true I Am. This was the beginning of the process that connected me to my forgotten personal story or myth – which later turned out to be a blueprint of the collective Myth, described in “The Jekyll and Hyde-family.”

*

And since I like to mix the silly with the more “serious” – here is my latest poem:

Today I am talking about what lies in our vast unconscious mind of sabotage-patterns that we, long time forgotten, have put there, not to “outshine” others and make them jealous and angry at us, and therefore attack.
What I have done lately is to give it up to God/Universe/Love/ – and honestly admit, ” I was afraid of you, I was afraid of outshine my father and You, afraid of your punishment and vengeance (meaning all that old testament stuff/archetypal stuff/ that the Bible and religions are full off – this vengeful and wrathful God/ and I am completely willing to be wrong about my perception of it, it is partial and dual. I now gladly give this up to you -”

Then I just SIT and do nothing else than noticing what is going on in the body.

Twice I have felt this sweet sweet loving field of – God/Life – enveloping me, and gradually a falling away of all my wishes and expectation about how it SHOULD be – sensing and knowing in that timeless space that all was good, and my manuscript was well taken care of – and i saw that my intense fear of not being supported financially at the same time was my doubt that God/Universe would provide for me if I did what pleased me – like writing.

And from my perspective, doubting God is doubting my Self

These insights just happened while I sat in this space where i was willing to let go of my need to be right – and righteous 🙂 – about my fears of not being supported.

And something let go

I prayed to be alert to any synchronicities and signs that I WAS supported – and that my stories will be “out there” – AND that I will have the necessary certainty and love to respond to any feedback about the stories.

The excerpt below is from “When fear comes home to Love” and it is exactly about this fear we all have as a deep unconscious musical theme in our life-symphony, and what happened of wondrous “impossible” happenings in my life when I made a break with it.

*

6.1 Turn around or die: saying no to Crusher / 1998

Halfway through my education in Expressive Therapy, I decided to take the second half of it in Switzerland – not my own country. The criterion for having my final diploma was to have a certain number of hours of practice at a Psychiatric Institution. My own patients’ sessions within a week in private practice had to be moved together in three days, so I could do my two practice-work-days at the Institution. This involved a colossal burden of work, and an insane pressure on me to “be on top and manage everything.”

Bird ( the perfection and performance-persona) couldn’t take it. After half a year with this workload I felt like death was breathing down my neck. I applied to the Swiss educational director at that time to have the sessions from my private practice included and counted as clinical work, and received a clear no: the hours would only count if they came from institutional practice.

This was the only way I could get acknowledgment for my work, and give me the necessary status as Expressive Arts therapist.

Easter came. I had booked a place on an educational seminar in Switzerland. The ticket was bought, the seminary-tuition paid. The week before the trip I became weaker and weaker. The night before going I felt fragmented and had frequent anxiety-attacks. The Crusher was whipping my brain: “This is THE ONLY WAY you can have paper certification of your education!” “Maybe it will get better when I get there?” I thought – “When push comes to shove, I have long experience in enduring.”

I rose at about 05:00. On my way to the airport in a taxi, I felt as if I was on the way to my own execution. I had the choice: To drop the education, and not have a certificate – or continue, and crush all the signs of deep alarm that my psyche and body gave me. The thought of aborting the education in Switzerland was an unbearable thought – I loved it so much, and there was Paolo and Margo, who received me and nourished my soul in ways I never before had experienced.

We approached the exit road to the Airport. “Now I have to decide!!!” said an inner voice. And the situation I had created, identifying with ego’s teaching of pressure as necessary, now manifested in a beautifully exact symbol of the inner pressure – a HUGE shadow to our left. It was the biggest trailer I ever saw. I sensed the blast from it inside the taxi, and got deadly afraid. Slowly the trailer squeezed us closer to the stonewall on our right side; we were practically down in the ditch now. The trailer drew inexorably nearer. I knew, without an inch of doubt, that here was my choice: proceed and be crushed, or return and survive – return and choose ME. I yelled to the driver: “I have to return back home!” (Yes, very symbolic). In the very same second, the trailer turned back to the highway. The taxi-driver turned to me, white as chalk, sweat dripping: “What the devil was he doing?!”

So I told him to drive me home. Unpacked the suitcases (that had to be done before I could relax) collapsed under the covers and lost control. I had chosen me – with the consequence that I had lost any hope of working as a therapist. Four years wasted – not to mention, over fifteen thousand dollars I had paid until now. I called for a doctor, who told me I was burned out.

The next fourteen days I lay flat on my back, crying. I was the smallest and most helpless in the world – but it dawned on me that I was on my side: at last I had proven to myself that I was more important than a piece of paper. I was certain that I had lost the money for the seminar and the air-tickets – thousands of dollars.

But I got everything refunded – contrary to the Institute’s usual policy. I thanked the Institute, and wrote to the leader that I could not fill the demands of the amount of practice-sessions at the Psychiatric Institution.

And then – listen to the beauty of universal law:

When I support myself, so does the universe. Soon after this the Swiss leader got ill, and another took her place. He accepted the sessions from my private clinical practice – and I received my leaving certificate. He even appointed me as a supervisor.

And by the way: all my money was returned to me, too.

In the moment I chose myself, the Crusher drew back.

Here is the turning-point in our process. Do we go on crushing ourselves (calling it duty) or do we choose LIFE?

and then the griefs when the electronic Kindle versions are corrupted and I un-publish them, and they are still there to be bought- in my name – oo, SO unpleasant –

But I am noticing a very interesting thing:

I have been in a vicious circle which I now see how I have made. Which is a good thing to see!

The mechanism is very simple: looking at errors and accepting them as real make it so. I have looked at everything seemly going wrong with the books – editing, corruptions in the ebook-process -endless misunderstandings – and reacting at these faults and glitches has made more and more of them: I am a Course student, and the Course really hammers this in that what we put our belief in, becomes real for us.

Concentrating on errors make more errors.And in my case, it has made me identify -again and again -with the childhood-girl in fear and pain

I talked to Kit today and described the feeling of deep frustration and depression about all the seeming obstacles to the books being published – and Kit helped me see that what was missing here, was my own support for myself, and the joy I felt I have put into them. She made me see this by insisting of giving time for herself to really sense the joy she felt when I talked about the books and the work.

I sat there and just felt my nervous system calm down and starting to glow in joy. I had not given space to this before – just for short glimpses. Now I sat and let it envelope me – the feeling of having done a great work, and how grateful I am for myself really hanging in there for 22 years in spite of the troubles and darkness that followed the process.

It is not the scared child-identity who needs to be involved in this books and “get them published”: I have done that, in spite of the fear and the scares.

I am going to rest in this true I today.

And allowing myself to print here the 2 reviews and Kit’s comment to “When fear comes home to Love” on its forum-site for writers.

The little Leelah squirms and sweats now and tells me that this is very very bad to do – showing off like this –

and I smile to her, knowing it is just an old belief she has held on to –

and here are the 2 reviews, which made me cry –

and then Kit’s

“Please please you don’t have to read them” little Leelah cries now, and I tell her “the readers of the blog know this, sweetie, they do it only if they want to – they can choose –

Due to its unusual title, I began this little book not really knowing what to expect. What I found is exactly what the title claims.

108 highly unusual methods, any of which could be practiced at home, with no outside assistance, to aid us in difficult times,and enrich us at other times.
Exercise One is simply called LOVE: “It is not what happens to us that decides your state of being–but how we respond to it, and ourselves. When we truly master this one, we are home.”
This book is packed full of marvelous, beautiful, almost magical wisdom. I highly recommend it

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful (me LOL)

5.0 out of 5 stars PRACTICAL, SPIRITUAL, HONEST, AND DO-ABLE, July 1, 2013

I just recommended this book to a client. Unlike any book I’ve seen, it contains a series of practical and do-able -even potentially fun – modes of accessing our Selves with an eye to healing. So often suggestions for self-help exercises seem too complicated or time-demanding to fit into our daily lives. Not so with these, with possibilities including the use of photography, enjoying nature, verbalizing — as in creative journaling — dance — body movement, and more.

As I read these, I knew they would have helped me back in the days of my own therapy when I could hardly avoid moving into myself when I wasn’t busy doing my daily work, and even sometimes as I was working. What’s clear is that each of these 108 Proposals has been helpful to the author herself.

I’m looking forward to hearing stories from my own clients about ways this book has helped.

*

Kit wrote:

Dear Leelah,

Your book is a most precious gift to me as a reader!

What an adventure into the dark corners of us humans – and the wonderful thing is that by you seeing the needs behind your own and other peoples painful feelings and destructive behaviors – you are actually able to set yourself free – and I as a reader join the ride by melting into a very loving and forgiving place in myself! So I actually get at taste of freedom, too – that is what I call a powerful read!!! I LOVE books that touches me deeply and in a transformative way, like your book does to me. That is actually the kind of books I am searching for – and I find them quite rare!

And another thing – even though your book covers very painful issues of abuse etc – it is sprinkled with so much humor, playfulness and curiosity, that the heaviness evaporates into something light and peaceful, filled with insights and love.

I love the way you use stories from real life – either your own or case studies from your clients – it makes it so convincing. I find it so much more interesting to read about somebody that have been struggling with existential issues in life and found a way to handle them – than books only telling me in a normative way how I “should live my life”.

I actually think that your book is a wonderful answer to the so-called “problem of evil” in the world – through your story you show in a truthful, wise and loving way that there is actually no evil person, just a lot of very destructive behavior, covering up for a persons deepest fears! I love this way of seeing the world 🙂

On my iPhone, I write down quotes which inspire me – and I keep reading them again and again as a way of reminding me of what I value in life. And your book has been a wonderful source for such quotes – here are a few of them:

“All addicts are pieces of God, forgetting Who they are. Look upon them with this knowing, and you look upon you.”

“In our everyday life, we experience that what we avoid doing something with, certainly does something to us, and pursue us – until we stop, turn around and bless it.”

“We are the very arena where the primal forces of life and death meet and dance – and as the Divine sparks we are, we have the freedom to play with it.”

“What determines your experience is where you place your belief.”

“What if we see perpetrators not as being evil – but as being trapped and captured by their own denial and ignorance – which breed evil.”

“When we want to bring the characters in The Sacred Tree of Horrors out of their trappedness and their deadly blind repetition, we play with it and invite it into the clear room of nonjudgemental awareness. In Expressive Arts Therapy, there are myriads of ways to play with this. And what a relief: we don’t have to figure things out with our mind – but letting it reveal itself to s and surprise us!”

“Inner demons are demons because they are hungry for something they are not getting. […] We create them by ignoring and judging our painful feelings.”

Healing Crisis:108 Ways to Turn Crises into Possibilities

When Fear Comes Home to Love

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